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Emma Thompson on Kenneth Branagh’s romance with Helena Bonham Carter and divorce

Emma Thompson

Emma Thompson on Kenneth Branagh’s romance with Helena Bonham Carter and divorce

  • In a recent interview with American news, Emma Thompson discussed her traumatic divorce from her former spouse Kenneth Branagh in 1995
  • When Thompson and Branagh got married in 1989, the British media even referred to them as the “Golden couple” at the time
  • Thompson and Branagh had first met when co-starring in the BBC series Fortunes of War

Thompson opened up about discovering of Branagh’s infidelity in a recent interview. The actor and director met Helena Bonham Carter while playing love interests in the 1994 movie Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and they began an affair. Carter played Victor Frankenstein’s adoptive sister and fiancée while Branagh directed and starred in the film as Victor Frankenstein.

On being “blind” to Branagh’s affair, Emma Thompson

I was completely, completely unaware that he had connections with other women on set, the Nanny McPhee actor admitted in an interview with The New Yorker. “What I learnt,” she said, “is how simple it is to be deluded by your own desire to deceive yourself.” Previously, the actress had discussed her iconic Love Actually sequence depicting anguish after learning of her husband’s infidelity and revealed that it was inspired by a true story as she admitted in a 2018 interview that she had her “heart very brutally shattered by Ken.”

About Emma Thompson’s divorce

In a recent interview, the 63-year-old actress also discussed how traumatic her 1995 divorce from Branagh was for her, claiming that she was only “half alive” at the time. “Any sense of being a loveable or worthy person has utterly vanished,” she continued. Reminiscing about how she originally fell in love with Kenneth while they were coworkers, she said that he was “incandescent with ambition and performing energy.”

While the British media regarded the couple as a power couple after their wedding, Emma said she was “embarrassed largely” by the moniker, and they certainly didn’t feel like it. Emma Thompson married Greg Wise in 2003 after divorcing Branagh. They had first met while working on the filming of Sense and Sensibility.

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